According to statistics from the National IPv6 Development Monitoring Platform, in February 2023, China’s mobile network IPv6 traffic accounted for 50.08%, achieving a historic breakthrough of mobile network IPv6 traffic surpassing IPv4 traffic for the first time, marking a new milestone in China’s efforts to promote IPv6 scale deployment and application.
IPv6, as the globally recognized next-generation Internet commercial application solution, has always been highly valued in China. This time, the IPv6 traffic share exceeded 50%, not only indicating that China’s IPv6 network “highway” has been fully built, the information infrastructure IPv6 service capability has been basically available, but also that “traffic” on the “highway” has become the industry norm.
But from an international perspective, China’s overall IPv6 deployment rate is still not high, lagging behind mainstream developed countries and many developing countries. To promote China’s IPv6 development, more “cars” need to run on the “highway”, so that IPv6 network can achieve a transition from “usable” and “easy to use” to “loved by” the industry.
IPv4 is the first IP protocol to be widely used and has contributed to the development of the Internet worldwide. IPv4 can provide about 4.3 billion IP addresses, which seemed very large at the time. These addresses seemed to never run out. But times have changed too fast. After the Internet era, came the mobile Internet and Internet of Things era, and the demand for IP addresses surged. 4.3 billion addresses simply cannot meet the demand.
In fact, IPv4 addresses ran out many years ago, but they were alleviated by technologies such as NAT traversal. But this did not fundamentally solve the problem, and the transition technology also has some “side effects”, such as making the network structure more complex, network traceability more difficult and so on.
The only one who can really solve the IP address shortage problem is IPv6, which can provide almost unlimited IP addresses. IPv4 uses a 32-bit address length, and there are about 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses available worldwide. IPv6 uses a 128-bit address length, and its address capacity reaches 2^128 power, about 3.4×10^30 billion IP addresses, greatly expanding the IP address space. Industry insiders often say this: IPv6 can provide an IP address for every grain of sand on Earth.
Compared with IPv4, IPv6 has many advantages, such as improving router forwarding speed of data packets, improving service quality, having higher security, and developing large-scale real-time interactive applications, etc., to better meet the application needs of 5G, industrial Internet, cloud-network integration, computing power network and so on. In terms of enhancing network perception of business capabilities, IPv6 encapsulates application requirements information in data packets, enabling networks to perceive applications and their requirements for traffic scheduling and resource adjustment.
In order to improve the level of IPv6 application, a series of heavy policies have been issued one after another. In February 2023, China’s mobile network IPv6 traffic accounted for 50.08%, indicating that the quality of IPv6 network and application is constantly improving. In addition, according to monitoring by China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), as of February 2023, more than 95% of CDN nodes in China support IPv6; among 54 available domains of cloud hosts from 13 major domestic cloud service enterprises, those with better IPv6 access quality than IPv4 access quality are 40, accounting for 74.07%.
The National IPv6 Development Monitoring Platform also shows that China currently ranks second in the world in terms of IPv6 address ownership, behind the United States; there are 740 million active users of IPv6 Internet, accounting for 70.64% of users. In terms of website applications, central ministries, provincial government portal websites, financial central enterprise portal websites, and central key news media websites all support IPv6 at a rate of 100%. In addition, Top100 mobile Internet applications and Top100 Internet websites support IPv6 at rates of 99% and 72.83% respectively.
However, looking at the international situation, China’s overall deployment rate of IPv6 is still relatively lagging behind. The Global IPv6 Forum’s “2022 Global IPv6 Support White Paper” shows that as of November 2022, France and Germany’s overall deployment rate of IPv6 exceeded 70%, India was 67%, Japan and the United States were close to 60%, Canada was 54.37%, Mexico was 59.17%, while China was only 31.68%.
For domestic IPv6, more “cars” need to run on the “highway”, by carrying out IPv6 value enhancement and application innovation, accelerating the construction of industrial ecology, and promoting the large-scale deployment of IPv6.